Peggy-zilla

For some, a peggy 2.0 is pretty cool, but simply not impressive enough. [MonsieurBon] felt this way and simply built a larger LED rig for his peggy2.0. It still uses the brains of the peggy, but the LED array is a custom built cabinet, using ping pong balls as diffusers. Another interesting modification is that they added a midi port to the setup to generate music based on what LEDs are lit. They say it creates some nice background generative music during the game of life. You can see a video of the system in action after the break.

It looks like they weren’t the only ones with this idea. The u:moon project is very similar, meant to be hung from a balloon. There seems to be an issue with the gallery on his page though, so you might want to go to his picasa gallery.

Why would you take that out of your room? I’m going to build one in my room and do what they did: just shut off the lights and watch the game of life play (with the nice midi background music). Excellent.

We get it out of the room in its two pieces. The support structure legs come apart, and the main panel breaks down into two pieces.

We took this to Burning Man this year, and enjoyed watching people play Pong and experiment with Life.

We’ll be putting together more of a write-up at some point soon.

As for the “midi board,” we use TWI (aka I2C) to send board state data from the display-driving AtMega328P to a second AtMega328P. That second microcontroller parses the board data, then converts it to MIDI serial data and sends it through a MIDI cable to a Roland JV-1010 MIDI sound module (the best/cheapest I could find that didn’t require 120v). We came up with markers to tell the second microcontroller when the board has refreshed, and when the mode (Pong/Sketch/Life) has changed, as we wanted different sounds out of each mode.